1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to content consumption and more particularly to content discovery in a content distribution network such as the World Wide Web (the “Web”).
2. Description of the Related Art
A content distribution network is a computer communications network supporting the dissemination of content such as documents, visual, audio and audiovisual material. The Web and its predecessor technologies represent the predominant mode of publically distributing content about the global Internet. In the circumstance of the Web, different content servers such as Web servers provide programmatic access to stored “pages” or to content dynamically assembled into pages at the request of different content consumers submitting requests for content to the content servers. The content consumers, in turn, utilize content rendering technologies such as Web browsers or media players to retrieve and render the requested content returned by the content servers.
The vast depth of the global Internet and in particular, the Web, complicates the ability of content consumers to locate content of interest for consumption. Recognizing this problem, search engines were developed nearly in parallel with the development of the Internet more than fifteen years ago. Today, terms such as “Google” have become synonymous with the concept of searching for content published in the Web. Still, discovering content through the use of a search engine requires the manual action of the end user to seek out content and to retrieve discovered content. To the extent an end user chooses not to search for content, content potentially of relevance to the end user will go undiscovered.
The notion of content syndication provides for an automated way in which content consumers can be made aware of content of interest without first requiring the content consumers to physically and manually search for the content of interest. The most popular form of content syndication utilizes the really simple syndication (RSS) protocol in which once a content user subscribes to content from a particular content source, the content user will be notified of changes to the content by way of a “feed”. Yet, it is to be recognized that even for RSS feeds, the content consumer at some point must choose to receive syndicated content from a particular source. Content from content sources unknown a priori to the content consumer will remain undiscovered.
The direct marketing industry for many decades has capitalized on the knowledge of individual preferences to push paper content of potential interest to the consumer. In this regard, for many years, subscribers could complete a form survey of interests in exchange for a free subscription to content. Using the form survey, additional unknown content could be sent by regular mail to the subscriber—generally in the form of direct mail. Thus, while this manual form of intelligent syndication of advertising content had proven effective over the years, this manual form of intelligent syndication has not been similarly effective within the global Internet in the delivery of solicited commercial electronic mail.